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Friday, 30 June 2017

I
have written about our local problems with water. From plenty to
potental shortage.

I
is not only the effects of last year's earthquake but of shortage
through abrupt climate change, something that, up to now has gone
completely unacknowledged, except by a few people with plenty of
commonsense.

The
Hutt river in the climate change-induced drought

'Urgent'
freshwater search under way in Wellington

Wellington's
fragile freshwater supply is set to become less of a worry, with
hydrogeologists looking for emergency supplies under the city.

After
a big earthquake, it could take up to 100 days to reconnect water
supplies to central and eastern parts of Wellington - unless new
sources can be found. Photo: CORBIS

November's
7.8 magnitude Kaikōura earthquake exposed Wellington and Porirua's
reliance on feeder pipes to deliver fresh water from other centres,
with the pipes crossing over fault lines in multiple places.

That
fragility means central and eastern parts of the capital could wait
up to 100 days for water supplies to be reconnected after a big
quake.

To
ease the pressure, Wellington Water is investigating 11 possible
sites for emergency water bores in Porirua and Wellington, and 11
stream catchments.

Later
this week, it will also start drilling into the Waiwhetu Aquifer
under the harbour, off the northern tip of the Miramar peninsula.

Photo: Supplied:
Wellington Water

Wellington
Water chief executive Colin Crampton said the projects would improve
the city's resilience.

"After
a major earthquake, the water supply will stop. Even though it's a
great source, our early settlers built a lot of that infrastructure
over known fault lines," he said.

"One
of our critical jobs... is to address the 100 days in the eastern
side of Wellington.

"This
morning we sent a drill rig out into the harbour, and the idea there
is if the aquifer does indeed go all the way out through the harbour
and to the entrance, we should be able to drill down and find water.
It should be of the right quality and quantity to provide an
alternative source."

The
11 bores around the city would be completed within the next 18
months.

In an emergency, utes will fill bladders with water for people to access. Photo: RNZ / Michael Cropp

In
an emergency, utes would fill 1000L water bladders from the bores,
and carry that water to 300 sites across the region.

That
would ensure no one had to walk further than 1km, or 500m in hilly
areas, to collect 20L of water a day.

The
project is expected to cost about $12 million, $6m of which is coming
from the government.

Local
Government Minister Anne Tolley said the recent earthquakes showed
the heightened risk, and said the 100-day figure was pretty scary.

"This
part of [Wellington Water's] project was quite urgent, and we felt
that, as central government, it was something we could actually
partner with them. We're always worried about setting a precedent, we
don't want to be working with all local government around New
Zealand, but these two cities - Porirua and Wellington - had no local
water supply.

"It
made sense that we went in partnership with them to provide these
community based supplies," Mrs Tolley said.

Civil
Defence Minister Nathan Guy and Local Government Minister Anne Tolley
said it made sense for central government to contribute to the
project. Photo: RNZ / Michael Cropp

Despite
the planned bores, Civil Defence Minister Nathan Guy said everyone
needed to make sure they had enough water stored at their houses for
the first seven days.

"This
is important, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Ultimately it's
down to personal responsibility," he said.

Wellington
Chamber of Commerce chief executive John Milford said the effects of
the capital losing water would bring the community to a halt and stop
many businesses from operating.

"We've
got to ensure supply, and furthermore that we can get back to
'business as usual' as quickly as possible.

"We
commend both central and local government for working together to
secure, strengthen and safeguard our region's resilience," he
said.

A
winter drought in New Zealand is not so obvious as it is in
Australia. However, I have noted that here where I live n Wellington
we have never really recovered from previous droughts.

This
is confirmed by the fact that people in Ohariu Valley, near
Wellington are having to get in water trucks in early-winter. I have
also received a comment that the water table is worryingly low in
Nelson.

You’d
be lucky to find any official conformation of this – but anecdote
in this is invaluable.

Official
figures from the Bureau of Meteorology included 219mm for the Orange
Agricultural Institute, which was its highest-ever June rainfall in
more than 50 years of weather records for the site.

However,
the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries said falls
across the state for this month were generally 60 to 80 per cent
lower than normal.

"A
lot of it was very variable, very stormy, patchy rainfall, and
unfortunately there are areas that missed out, primarily areas of the
north-west and the central and northern central-west," seasonal
conditions coordinator Ian McGowen said.

He
said more rainfall was urgently needed across most areas of the state
to help primary producers with winter production.

PHOTO: Records
of rain in Orange, NSW, showing the huge totals of 2016 compared to
the much drier 2017.(ABC
Central West: Melanie Pearce)

A
lot of nervous growers

In
the state's north-west, some farms have not sown crops because of
insufficient soil moisture and others, particularly the later-sown
ones, are struggling.

Some
livestock producers are grazing stock on crops or waiting to do so,
and Parkes-based stock and station agent Geoff Rice said people were
starting to get nervous.

"Definitely
a few nerves. If we don't see a fairly decent rainfall event in the
near future things will definitely change," he said.

DPI
beef cattle officer based in Glen Innes, Todd Andrews, said the
situation in the New England and north-west was a little less dire
than in other parts of inland NSW, but producers were hoping for up
to 50mm of rain soon to secure crops and pastures for spring.

No
wet sheep this year

Tom
Matthews, who farms near Grenfell in the central-west, said at this
stage he was not concerned and was enjoying the dry days after
difficulties shearing this time last year.

"No
dramas with wet sheep, it's fantastic. [We had] 163mm last year
compared to five this year, so it's a big difference," Mr
Matthews said.

Another
central-west business operator, Ian Rogan, who runs a commercial
nursery at Millthorpe near Orange, has received about 27 millimetres
in May-June this year compared to 261mm for the same period in 2016.

"It
was much, much wetter, I'd probably say even too wet in June last
year, but this year it's just been extremely dry," he said.

This
year Mr Rogan is having to water his 10,000 potted plants every few
days, and he said he was looking for some rain to fall to encourage
gardeners to get out into their gardens.

For
an inland NSW mine, the wet to dry turnaround between last winter and
this one has its pros and cons.

Alkane
Resources director Ian Chalmers said he did not think he had seen it
quite this dry for a long time at the Tomingley mine, and if there
was not enough rainfall there could be concerns about water supply
and dust control.

However,
he said he did not want the mine to get "washed away" like
it did in the last half of last year, when May and June rains led to
July flooding.

A
dry July?

As
farmers and others look to the skies, what are they likely to hold?

The
Bureau of Meteorology's rainfall outlook for June to August indicates
drier than normal conditions are likely across NSW.

Meteorologist
and lecturer with Newcastle University, Martin Babakhan, said in the
first few days of July there could be the chance of light rain in the
state's inland, and then from the 5th until the end of the month,
none at all.

He
said the Indian Ocean played the most important role in winter and
spring, and it was in a "positive state" now, meaning there
was going to be below average rainfall in those seasons for central
and south-east Australia and NSW.

"The
winter is not a wet season for Australia. So still conditions are
going to be dry at this stage," Mr Babakhan said.

In
another sign that the iceberg calving is imminent, the
soon-to-be-iceberg part of Larsen C Ice Shelf has tripled in speed to
more than ten meters per day between 24th and 27th June 2017. The
iceberg remains attached to the ice shelf, but its outer end is
moving at the highest speed ever recorded on this ice shelf.

We still
can’t tell when calving will occur - it could be hours, days or
weeks - but this is a notable departure from previous observations.

Comparison
of speeds between Sentinel-1 image mosaics in early and late June
2017. The early mosaic combines displacements on the inner shelf
measured between 6th and 12th June with similar ones on the outer
shelf measured between 3rd and 15th June. The recent mosaic combines
inner shelf displacements up to 24th June with outer shelf
displacements only 3 days later highlighting a significant
acceleration over those three days.

The
most recent observations on 27th June do not cover the rift tip, but
a low resolution Sentinel-1 image of just after midnight on 28th June
shows clearly that the iceberg remains attached to the ice shelf at
its western end - for now.

When
it calves, the Larsen C Ice Shelf will lose more than 10% of its area
to leave the ice front at its most retreated position ever recorded;
this event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic
Peninsula. We have previously
shown that
the new configuration will be less stable than it was prior to the
rift, and that Larsen C may eventually follow the
example of its neighbour Larsen B,
which disintegrated in 2002 following a similar rift-induced calving
event.

The
MIDAS Project will continue to monitor the development of the rift
and assess its ongoing impact on the ice shelf. Further updates will
be available on this blog, and on our Twitter
feed.

Nothing quite like optimsm and hopium even if there is no evidence to support it!

In 1989 the UN warned that 1C could not be exceeded and we had 10 years to fix things.

Now, 30 years later we are quite possibly at 1.8C higher than pre-industrial average termperatures (less than that if you believe the false figures) and we still have three years to get cliamte change under control.

I wonder how they prepose to do that with a melting Arctic and dozens of self-reinforcing feedbacks.

These
experts say we have three years to get climate change under control.
And they’re the optimists.

A
group of prominent scientists, policymakers, and corporate leaders
released a statement Wednesday warning that if the world doesn’t
set greenhouse gas emissions on a downward path by 2020, it could
become impossible to contain climate change within safe limits.

The
group, led by Christiana Figueres, who oversaw the United Nations
negotiations that produced the Paris climate agreement, base their
case on simple math. The world, they calculate, probably has a
maximum of 600 billion remaining tons of carbon dioxide that can be
emitted if we want a good chance of holding the rise in planetary
temperatures within the Paris limit of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7
to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

With
41 billion tons emitted every year from energy consumption and other
sources, such as deforestation, there are only about 15 years before
that budget is exhausted.

Emissions
can’t suddenly go to zero after 15 years — the world economy
would grind to a halt if they did. Therefore, they must be put on a
downward path almost immediately.

“When
it comes to climate, timing is everything,” write Figueres and her
co-authors, including scientists Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Stefan
Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in a
commentary in the journal Nature. The commentary has six authors and
was endorsed by dozens of co-signers from the climate science and
policy world as well as from industry.

The
paper by Figueres, who now leads an initiative called Mission 2020,
was directly aimed at influencing the upcoming G-20 meetings in
Germany. It also notes President Trump’s decision to withdraw the
United States from the Paris accord.

“The
whole purpose of this comment … is to wake up the intentionality
and the ingenuity that we must bring to this effort, because of the
urgency,” Figueres said during a call with reporters.

Fortunately,
global emissions have been flattening lately. Not going down — but
not rising, either. The past three years have instead shown a
leveling-off thanks to a decline of coal burning by the United States
and China.

Yet
to achieve their objectives, extremely rapid carbon cuts would be
required on a tremendous scale.

By
2020, among other objectives, all of the world’s coal plants would
have to be on the path to retirement (and no new ones can be built),
and electric vehicles would have to explode in popularity, moving
from 1 percent of global sales to 15 percent in just three years, an
extraordinarily rapid rate of growth.

Deforestation
would have to decline sharply and then end entirely. By 2030, global
forests would actually have to start pulling carbon dioxide out of
the air. That is an enormous lift, given the entrenched nature of
deforestation and the economic pressures in the developing world to
convert forested land to agriculture and ranching.

But
if emissions are not on a significant downward path by 2020, the
logic is inevitable — it gets increasingly difficult to control
global warming. The reason is simple. The later emissions reach their
peak, the more rapidly they would have to decline following that
peak. At some point it becomes impossible to cut emissions as fast as
would be necessary to avoid busting the limited carbon “budget.”

These
kinds of considerations are why a number of researchers have
expressed skepticism about global temperatures increasing less than
two degrees Celsius. Keeping the temperature change below 1.5 Celsius
is even harder and, increasingly, being considered unachievable by
scientists. (It has already increased about one degree Celsius.)

“I
have said for quite a while now that I don’t think 2C is possible,”
said Glen Peters, an expert on carbon budgets and climate change at
the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, in response to
the new missive by Figueres and her colleagues. “I would like to be
wrong, and I am happy to aim for 2C or lower. But, I can’t look
people in the eye and give them false hope.”

Peters
did acknowledge that there was a purpose to maintaining optimism,
though he said that “personally, I don’t see that as my role.”

Such
is where we are. There’s a narrowing window of time to fix the
climate problem before crossing new thresholds — but since we’re
still not actually at them yet, there’s still room for both
optimists and pessimists.

UNITED
NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire
nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels
if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal
flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ''eco-
refugees,' ' threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director
of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He
said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the
greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

As
the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to
three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island
nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on
Wednesday.

Coastal
regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded,
displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt's
arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food
supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency study.

''Ecological
refugees will become a major concern, and what's worse is you may
find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the
natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn't have to worry
about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?'' he said.

UNEP
estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to
protect its east coast alone.

Shifting
climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to
Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap
bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a
study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems
Analysis.

Excess
carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity's
use of fossil fuels and burning of rain forests, the study says. The
atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates, much like a
greenhouse.

The
most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth's temperature
will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

The
difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees
warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years
ago.

Brown
said if the warming trend continues, ''the question is will we be
able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10
years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we
have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.''

He
said even the most conservative scientists ''already tell us there's
nothing we can do now to stop a ... change'' of about 3 degrees.

''Anything
beyond that, and we have to start thinking about the significant rise
of the sea levels ... we can expect more ferocious storms,
hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.''

He
said there is time to act, but there is no time to waste.

UNEP
is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of
1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992. In May,
delegates from 103 nations met in Nairobi, Kenya - where UNEP is
based - and decided to open negotiations on the treaty next year.

Nations
will be asked to reduce the use of fossil fuels, cut the emission of
carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane and
fluorocarbons, and preserve the rain forests.

''We
have no clear idea about the ecological minimum of green space that
the planet needs to function effectively. What we do know is that we
are destroying the tropical rain forest at the rate of 50 acres a
minute, about one football field per second,'' said Brown.

Each
acre of rain forest can store 100 tons of carbon dioxide and
reprocess it into oxygen.

Brown
suggested that compensating Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya for
preserving rain forests may be necessary.

The
European Community istalking about a half-cent levy on each kilowatt-
hour of fossil fuels to raise $55 million a year to protect the rain
forests, and other direct subsidies may be possible, he said.

The
treaty could also call for improved energy efficiency, increasing
conservation, and for developed nations to transfer technology to
Third World nations to help them save energy and cut greenhouse gas
emissions, said Brown.

Some very well-known people can get very angry if you try to burst their hopium bubble, especially if you back it up with evidence.

Just yesterday Mr. Hockey Stick, Michael Mann, posted an attack on Guy McPherson with this article from our very own James Renwick.

Residents
were told the meeting was held behind closed doors because
of “security
and public safety concerns” following
the storming of the Town Hall a fortnight ago. Protesters
occupied the council building on
the Friday following the tragedy in anger at the council’s
response.

According
to the local authority’s website, councillors will discuss the fire
with support officers and “invited
guests (if any).”

The
press is also not allowed in the meeting.

There
will be no written reports other than minutes for the meeting, which
is described as an “oral
item.”

As
an official document, the minutes might only be made available to the
public much later.

“The
Labour group believe it is a grave mistake to exclude representatives
of the Grenfell survivors, others who have been affected by the fire
and also the media. We believe this will only give credence to the
view that there is a cover-up in progress and we do not accept the
excuse that there may be violence,” Labour
councillor Judith Blakeman said.

“The
Labour group have already called for the resignation of the entire
cabinet,” Blakeman,
who also sits on the Tenant Management Organization, which runs the
borough’s housing provisions, dded.

A
council spokesperson told the Guardian that all third parties were
barred from the meeting because of “recent
real threats and assaults on council staff and damage to one of the
office buildings.”

“Such
risks remain and we have had to take the decision to hold the meeting
in private as to do otherwise would likely result in disorder,” they
dded.